Read original...Last summer, even as he talked about facing jail time, Jim Stevenson couldn’t stop looking for birds. “There’s a couple yellow-crowned night herons,” he said, pointing out his living-room window. “They roost in that chinaberry tree.” He rested his eyes on the blue-gray birds. “Anyway, the cops pulled me over and searched my van and found the gun, and —”
A movement caught his eye. “Roseate spoonbill. And there’s a male orchard oriole.”
Stevenson is a bearish, ruddy-faced 54-year-old former science teacher who is known as the ornithological guru of Galveston, Tex. Ten years ago, he moved to this Gulf Coast barrier island because of its abundant shorebirds. Enormous flocks of American avocets, willets, sanderlings, dowitchers and plovers feed in the shallow, fertile estuary of Galveston Bay. Stevenson built his house amid a clump of trees so he could always be watching birds; he lives in a bird blind. Birds are his obsession and his profession. He is the director of the Galveston Ornithological Society and publisher of the quarterly newspaper Gulls n Herons. For money, he leads bird-watching tours.
Stevenson apologized for the paucity of species that day. “This part of summer you don’t have a lot of migration,” he said. “There’s still plenty to see, though. We go out tomorrow, I’ll load your wagon.”
By that he meant he would show me birds I could tick off my life list. Serious birders compile a list of every species they have seen in their lifetimes. I hadn’t come to Galveston to load my wagon, though. I had come to find out why Jim Stevenson had become the most notorious cat killer in America.
The story went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Stevenson took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds.
“Piping plovers are tame, abiding little creatures,” Stevenson told me. “They roost in the dunes and can’t see or hear a cat creep up on them.”
Stevenson said he tried to protect the birds by capturing the cat. He failed and returned home frustrated. Late that night, he worried the problem. “The American taxpayers spend millions of dollars to protect birds like piping plovers,” he said, “and yet here are these cats killing the birds, and nobody’s doing anything to stop it.”
The next morning, Stevenson decided to act. He loaded his .22 rifle in the van and took off for San Luis Pass. He spotted the same cat under the bridge. Stevenson put the animal in his sights and pulled the trigger.
“The cat dropped like a rock,” he said.
Up on the bridge, a tollbooth attendant named John Newland heard the shot. Newland, a quiet man in his 60s, often fed the cats under the bridge. He called them his babies. Newland bolted out of his tollbooth and saw Stevenson’s van. “I got you!” Newland screamed. “You quit shooting my cats!”
Stevenson fled, but the cops caught up to him near his house. A Galveston police officer cuffed him, read him his rights and threw him in jail.
With one shot of his rifle, Stevenson found himself cast as the Bernhard Goetz of birders. His cat slaying became a national flash point in the strange Sylvester-and-Tweety feud between birders and cat fanciers, which the resolution of Stevenson’s case last month has done little to pacify. For more than 20 years, the two sides have exchanged accusations and insults over the issue of cats killing birds. Depending on whom you talk to, cats are either rhinestone-collared mass murderers or victims of a smear campaign waged by lowdown cat haters. The National Audubon Society has declared that “worldwide, cats may have been involved in the extinction of more bird species than any other cause, except habitat destruction.” The American Bird Conservancy, a smaller, feistier group, runs a campaign to persuade cat owners to lock up their pets.
Cat defenders respond: They’re cats! They chase birds.
Much of the controversy focuses on the nation’s population of 50 to 90 million feral cats (exact figures are impossible to ascertain), former pets and their offspring that live independent of humans. Feral cats may not have owners, but they do have lobbyists. Alley Cat Allies, a national organization founded by an ex-social worker named Becky Robinson, harnesses a fierce coalition of celebrities, cat experts and feral-cat-colony caretakers to fight for the rights of wild cats. Her allies include Roger Tabor, a leading British naturalist; Jeffrey Masson, the outspoken author of “The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats” and “When Elephants Weep”; and, fittingly, Tippi Hedren, the actress best known for starring in the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “The Birds.” Which, as you will recall, was a film in which Hedren spent two hours dodging attacks by murderous birds.
Both sides weighed in on Stevenson’s shooting. Cat advocates called him cruel and criminal. The blog Cat Defender (“Exposing the Crimes of Bird Lovers”) labeled him the Evil Galveston Bird Lover. The president of the Houston Audubon Society condemned Stevenson’s “illegal methods of controlling these animals,” but other bird-watchers hailed his actions. One Texas birder, a fourth-grade science teacher, suggested that Stevenson be given a medal for his actions.
Like Goetz, who sparked a national debate when he shot four would-be robbers in a New York subway in 1984, Stevenson fired his gun during a time of heightened fear and anxiety. Bird populations are plummeting worldwide. Earlier this year BirdLife International found that 1,221 of the planet’s 9,956 bird species were threatened with extinction, an increase of 35 species since 2006. Although hopeful stories like the 2004 purported sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker — a species long thought extinct — tend to capture the public’s imagination, the larger story is a depressing and seemingly inexorable march toward oblivion. In June, the National Audubon Society reported that an analysis of 40 years of data from its annual Christmas bird count showed an alarming decline in nearly two dozen once-ubiquitous American songbirds. Since 1965, the common grackle has lost 61 percent of its population. Eastern meadowlarks are down 72 percent; northern bobwhites, 82 percent.
The primary cause of those losses is well known. Habitat destruction — industrial and agricultural development and suburban sprawl replacing forests and fields — is by far the biggest threat to bird populations. What is less understood is the extent to which a complex combination of secondary factors contributes to the decline. Power poles electrocute tens of thousands of birds. Estimates of birds killed in collisions with automobiles and glass windows every year run to the hundreds of millions.
Where cats sit in this continuum is a huge point of contention. Over the past 10 years or so, however, a growing body of research has implicated cats as a serious factor in the loss of native birds in specific habitats — mostly islands, often shorelines and sometimes inland areas. The World Conservation Union now lists the domestic cat as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species.
As a person fond of cats and fascinated by birds, I tracked the issue for years without joining either camp. Stevenson’s situation seemed to present a perfect microcosm of the problem. Which was the higher ethical duty, to save the bird or leave the cat unharmed?
At the center of it stood Jim Stevenson, unrepentant and sure. “What I did was not only legal,” he told me. “It was right.”
What are our obligations to cats and birds? It’s a tough question even for some cat advocates. Jeffrey Masson, a well-known Freud scholar as well as a cat fancier, faced the predicament a few years ago when he moved to New Zealand. “Our five cats started to hunt, as cats will,” Masson told me recently. “Our neighbor, a bird enthusiast, was furious. ‘Your cats are decimating these birds,’ she told me, and I had to agree. But I didn’t know quite what to do about it. True, the cats should not be here. But the cats were only doing what came naturally to cats.”
Masson, like Jim Stevenson in Galveston, found himself caught in a classic squeeze between two equal but conflicting values: the rights of individual animals set against the health of the overall ecosystem. It’s a battle that rages in philosophy departments across the country. “From an animal-welfare perspective, confining cats and shooting the cat, in the Galveston example, is wrong,” says J. Baird Callicott, a philosophy professor at the University of North Texas. Callicott, a past president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, taught one of the nation’s first environmental ethics courses in 1971. He went on to say, however, that “from an environmental-ethics perspective it’s right, because a whole species is at stake. Personally, I think environmental ethics should trump animal-welfare ethics. But just as personally, animal-welfare ethicists think the opposite.”
Out of curiosity, I boiled down the Jim Stevenson case and sent it to a few environmental-ethics professors. Most agreed with Callicott: Shoot the cat.
“You’re trading a feral cat, an exotic animal that doesn’t belong naturally on the landscape, against piping plovers, which evolved as natural fits in that environment,” reasons Holmes Rolston III, a Colorado State University professor who is considered one of the deans of American environmental philosophy. “And it trades an endangered species, piping plovers, against cats, which as a species are in no danger whatsoever. Suffering — the pain of the cat versus the pain of the plover eaten by the cat — is irrelevant in this case.”
Ultimately, Jeffrey Masson sided with the animal-welfare school. Confining his cats indoors, he decided, would be unfair to the cats. “A cat needs to hunt to survive — that is, they have the instinct to hunt,” he said. “Even if you could extinguish that instinct, should you? We already take their sexuality away. There are people who declaw their cats. How far do we take this before we completely destroy the animal?”
One point in the case against cats is undisputed: they destroy island ecosystems. A variant of the African wildcat, domestic cats probably first cozied up to humans in Egypt several thousand years ago. They populated the globe by riding the coattails of trade and empire. Cats were welcome members of sailing expeditions because of their small size, their agreeable temperament and their talent for killing shipboard rats. The British navigator James Cook was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of the cat. Cook brought tabbies on his 18th-century voyages around the Pacific, many of which were dropped off or stolen along the way.
The newcomers came ashore teeth first. Most oceanic islands had no mammalian predators before human contact, so native birds evolved with little ability to elude cats. Many were ground-nesters. Some lost, or never gained, the ability to fly. In Hawaii, at least 30 species or subspecies of forest birds were decimated or extirpated between 1870 and 1930, partly because cats ate them. In 1894, a lighthouse keeper’s cat on an island off New Zealand proudly presented his owner with dead specimens of a bird then unknown to science, thus discovering and extinguishing the Stephens Island wren in a single year. Forty years ago, when the Swiss ecologist Vinzenz Ziswiler added up the number of birds wiped out by introduced predators, he found that cats were implicated in 17 of 43 extinctions. The cat’s only rivals were the rat (14 extinctions) and the mongoose (9). As the naturalist Christopher Lever once wrote, “The list of species they have helped to exterminate or endanger reads like a roll call of avian disaster.”
But continents and islands are different. Continental birds had defenses against clawed mammals, so cats weren’t a problem. Or such was the comfortable conventional wisdom until recently in the United States, which has 1 in 4 of the world’s cats. The idea was challenged in 1987, when two biologists found that cats in a small English village were killing a surprising number of birds — nearly 300 by 78 cats in a single year. American biologists followed up with a study of cat kills in rural Wisconsin. John Coleman, a wildlife ecologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, and Stanley Temple, a University of Wisconsin professor, estimated that the state’s 1.4 to 2 million rural cats were killing between 8 million and 219 million birds every year.
Though that range was so large as to be of limited value, alarms went off in the birding world. If cats were taking out that many birds in a single state, imagine the carnage nationwide! Conservation groups urged cat owners to keep their pets indoors. The American Bird Conservancy suggested cat leashes.
Cat defenders scrambled to stay ahead of the story. They pointed out deficiencies in the Wisconsin study and said, correctly, that the situation couldn’t be simplified into a kills-per-cat formula. Some cats were expert hunters. Others didn’t hunt at all. The Wisconsin study dealt only with rural cats, and the authors didn’t look at whether the cats were taking down rare species or common starlings.
Cat advocates love to attack the Wisconsin study, but the more you delve into the scientific literature, the more the Wisconsin study looks like a red herring used by cat defenders to divert attention from more grounded research. In the past decade, at least a dozen studies published in top scientific journals like Biological Conservation, Journal of Zoology and Mammal Review have chronicled the problem of cat predation of small mammals and birds. The takeaway is clear: cats are a growing environmental concern because they are driving down some native bird populations — on islands, to be sure, but also in ecologically sensitive continental areas. At hot spots along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast, cat predation is a growing threat to shorebirds and long-distance migrants. And as wild habitat becomes more fragmented by human development, even some inland species are under increasing pressure from both house cats and their feral cousins.
In southern New Jersey, feral cats are killing migrating shorebirds, including a number of endangered species. In the scrubland canyons of Southern California, researchers have found that where coyote populations decline, the nonbird-eating carnivores are often replaced by domestic cats. Cat predation then leads to a decline in the abundance of native birds like the California quail, the greater roadrunner and the cactus wren.
On the big island of Hawaii, the problem approaches crisis proportions. The feral cats of Mauna Loa, the island’s active volcano, are decimating Hawaiian petrels, a seabird that nests in the volcano’s lava crevices and takes off on foraging runs to the Aleutian Islands — a round trip of more than 4,500 miles.
Several years ago, Fern Duvall, a wildlife biologist with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, compared two Hawaiian islands: one with a high feral-cat population, the other without any cats at all. He looked at fledging rates of seabirds, which measures the percentage of chicks that successfully leave the nest. On the cat island, only 13 percent of the chicks made it out alive. On the cat-free island, 83 percent survived.
Cats aren’t the only bird killers in Hawaii. Mongooses prey on birds, too. The difference, Duvall says, is that mongooses tend to take one or two birds and be satisfied. Cats can go postal. “We’ve had as many as 123 wedgetail shearwaters in one colony killed by a single cat,” he said. “Adult shearwaters are clumsy on the ground, and cats will come in at night and rip the skulls off the shearwater chicks. When you come upon the aftermath in the morning, it’s pretty horrendous.”
A few years ago, the State of Hawaii’s Department of Health considered a feeding ban on public lands as a way to tamp down the feral population. Cat advocates descended on the state capital, and state officials quickly realized they were throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest. “The public outcry killed it,” Fern Duvall recalled. “The health department didn’t realize what it was getting into. People who own cats are very emotionally attached to them — even feral cats that aren’t their own — and they’re extremely vocal.”
The day after our initial meeting in Galveston, Jim Stevenson and I drove down the Texas coast looking for birds. San Luis Pass was our first stop.
As we strolled through patches of spartina grass, it wasn’t hard to see why birds and birders would flock here. Galveston Bay is a shallow, fertile 600-square-mile estuary where the Trinity and San Jacinto Rivers mix with the saltwater of the gulf to produce an eruption of life. The hourglass of one of the main North American flyways narrows to its waist here, and the bay provides a safe, nourishing pit stop for neotropical migrants making their way to and from Central and South America. Stevenson swung his arms in an arc and named the birds around us like a trick shooter nailing tossed cards: “Four stilts, two laughing gulls, three godwits, a flock of royal terns, clapper rails and — there he is — one piping plover.”
We watched the plover dash across the sand in short spurts, hunting for insects and worms. Piping plovers live and breed on beaches from Newfoundland to North Carolina. They winter along the southern Atlantic and Gulf Coast. Hat makers nearly wiped them out during the 19th century, but the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 allowed them to recover. Postwar prosperity brought vacation houses and beach resorts (and cats) to the Atlantic coast, disturbing millions of acres of plover nesting ground. At last count, the species’ Atlantic population was down to fewer than 1,800 pairs.
“At night, the plovers tend to roost under the dunes against the bridge,” Stevenson said. “They sleep on the ground. It’s easy pickings for those cats.”
Under the bridge, I spotted an old plastic tray and a golf ball hanging down on a fishing line — a toy for the cats. A couple of gnarled ferals peeked out from some bushes.
Until the early 1980s, municipalities contained feral cats the old-fashioned way: they shot them. Or they trapped and killed them. “It was considered pest control,” says Roger Tabor, the British biologist. Tabor helped change that in the 1970s with his research on feral cats in London. He found that ferals weren’t loners. They lived in highly social colonies, and killing them didn’t work. If you removed some cats, others simply took their place. Tabor called it the vacuum effect.
Other methods were tried. A cat birth-control pill failed because you couldn’t control who ate it — set out a dish of spiked cat chow and you might affect the local raccoon population. Feeding bans were, as in Hawaii, shouted down or ignored. In the early 1980s, a number of cat activists began experimenting with a technique known as trap-neuter-return, T.N.R., which involved capturing feral cats, spaying or neutering them, then returning them to their colonies. T.N.R. seemed to work, and the movement spread. There are now several hundred groups that practice T.N.R. in the United States.
The problem with T.N.R., bird advocates contend, is that it doesn’t eliminate the problem. “We appreciate the neutering,” says Jim Cramer, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s New Jersey field office. “The problem is the release. Even neutered, well-fed cats are hunters.”
Stevenson said he tried to work with the local feral cat people. “People have dumped cats at San Luis Pass for years,” he told me. “I’ve tried to have dialogue with the trap-neuter-return people, tried to tell them their cats are wreaking havoc with wild bird populations. A few years ago, we ran an ad offering to pay for an outdoor enclosure, to keep the cats in. We got no takers. I’ve encouraged city officials to do something about the cats out there, and they did nothing.”
We talked about the drop in bird population. “We’ve lost 40 percent of our migrant songbirds in the last 25 years — a lot of this is why,” he said, peering out at dozens of new vacation condominiums going up along the shore. “We’ve taken away their food source and their habitat. Double whammy. Then they get here, and those migrants, man, they’re beat. For the cats, it’s easy pickings. They’re popping birds like they were M & M’s.”
In the late afternoon, we turned around and headed for home. Our route took us back past the San Luis Pass bridge just when John Newland happened to be out feeding the feral cats. Stevenson dropped me off — he wanted nothing to do with the toll taker — and I greeted Newland as he poured out about four pounds of Meow Mix. “I feed them twice a day,” he told me in a Texas twang. The sound of the food hitting the tray drew cats from between the rocks.
“How many cats are there?” I asked.
“I’d say about 15 to 20,” he said. “I can’t keep up with the babies. But the babies don’t last long. Maybe 1 out of 10 survive. We got coyotes, owls, hawks out here. I’ve seen owls carry my babies off.”
I asked him about Jim Stevenson.
“I’ve got pictures of the cats he shot,” Newland said angrily. “He shot a mother and a baby in their bed, splattered all over the wall.” Newland pointed to some grimy blankets strewn on a concrete shelf — feral-cat beds. “He shot one off the rocks here; you can see the bloodstain. The one he got caught doing was right there by that food tray. He shot her there, pregnant, and she died.”
This was the first I’d heard of Stevenson shooting more than one cat. “This wasn’t the first time your cats were shot?” I asked.
“Three days before he killed that pregnant cat, my coworkers heard four shots, saw a car going off toward the beach. It was his little Chevy compact.”
I left Newland and caught up to Jim Stevenson and his Chevy compact a few hundred yards from the bridge. “The toll taker says that wasn’t the only cat you shot,” I said. “He says you’ve been shooting at the cats for a while.”
Stevenson grew quiet. “What I would say to that,” he finally told me, “is that if that’s so, why doesn’t he have any evidence to support that accusation?”
We drove along in silence for a while. Then Stevenson spotted a dead bird on the side of the road. He stopped to check it out. “It’s a yellow-bellied cuckoo,” he said. He held the dead bird tenderly in his palm, ran his fingers through its soft feathers and explained in great detail the cuckoo’s fascinating toe structure.
Shortly after leaving Galveston, I traveled to Portland, Ore., to see the Wildlife Care Center, an emergency room operated by the city’s Audubon Society. Every year the center cares for 3,000 injured and diseased animals. In the process, center officials have compiled a rare and significant set of data. Since 1995, they have analyzed how all the wild animals admitted have been injured. The results are remarkable. Estimates for cat-injured animals, mostly birds, accounted for nearly one-quarter of all admittances. Other causes paled: car accidents (14 percent), window strikes (5 percent), dog-caused injuries (3 percent).
“The biggest complaint we get is cats,” Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Portland Audubon Society, told me. “The statistics are actually misleading. We only record an injury as cat-caused if the person saw the cat injure the bird. I’m kind of a stickler on that. A huge number of the injuries we record as ‘unknown’ are consistent with cat injuries, and the birds recorded as ‘orphaned’ are often that way because their mothers were caught by cats. . . . We often say that up to 40 percent of the injuries we see are cat related.”
On the morning I visited, a woman came in with an injured scrub jay. “One of my cats caught it,” the woman explained. Glancing at a “Cats Indoors!” brochure, she said somewhat sheepishly, “My cats are indoor-outdoor. I half expected a lecture from the people here, but I felt responsible for the bird, so I came anyway.”
Sallinger skipped the lecture and gave the bird to Karen Munday, an urban-wildlife specialist, who took it into an adjoining room and laid it out.
“This one’s got a wing abrasion and puncture wounds,” she said. That’s likely a fatal diagnosis. A cat’s teeth and gums contain enough bacteria to overwhelm a bird’s immune system. “What usually kills the bird isn’t the puncture; it’s the infection,” Munday explained. “A bird is more likely to survive a gunshot than a cat bite.”
Despite the number of cat-caused injuries, bird and cat advocates have achieved a rare détente in Portland. Sallinger works with the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon to keep cats in check near critical wildlife refuges.
Later that afternoon, I met up with Carma Crimins, a feral-cat-colony caretaker, in Portland’s Sellwood district. Since 1995, the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon has spayed or neutered more than 30,000 ferals. Given the superfecundity of cats, a little back-of-the-envelope math shows that their T.N.R. program has kept at least 100,000 potential ferals out of the system.Crimins, a stylish woman in her early 50s, manages two colonies in the city. One lives behind a small grocery store; the other, in an abandoned factory.
Crimins led me to the grocery-store colony. A half-dozen cats prowled around an open-air storage area, climbing up rusting grocery carts and lying on flattened boxes. “There’s Betty, Anita, Helen, the boys Tom and Vic and mother Maybelle,” Crimins said. This was a controlled population. A few years ago, Crimins said, 40 to 50 cats lived here. Using the T.N.R. method, Crimins swept up the little kittens and put them into good homes. Feral kittens are easily socialized to humans. It’s extremely difficult — some say impossible — for adult ferals to adjust to our presence. Crimins trapped the adults and had them spayed or neutered. Without constant batches of kittens, the colony stabilized at about 10 cats, where it remains today.
As Crimins told me this, I noticed that the cats had all vanished. “Where’d they go?” I asked.
“They’re still here, watching us,” Crimins said. “They don’t know you, so they’re hiding out.”
It occurred to me that this was the crux of the feral-cat problem. If you came at the feral-cat advocates with blunt force — with feeding bans or old-fashioned trap-remove-and-kill programs — they would fight, claws extended, in the political arena. But if they lost, they wouldn’t give up. They would vanish into cracks and crevices, slinking out to feed their cats when the coast was clear.
As his court date approached, Jim Stevenson was confident that a jury would vindicate his decision. “The cat was chasing an endangered species,” he told me. “I’d tried for years to get people to do something about those cats. So I decided that I needed to take that cat out.” The charge against him, animal cruelty, carried a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The state’s case hinged mainly on the contention that the murdered cat was a pet belonging to John Newland, the tollbooth attendant. “They’re using the term ‘feral cat,’ but that’s not the situation here,” Paige Santell, the Galveston County assistant district attorney, told me. (Until recently, killing a feral cat was a legal gray area in Texas. State legislators, inspired partly by the Stevenson case, made it illegal earlier this year. )
If the state proved that the cat belonged to Newland, however, it could have devastating ramifications for T.N.R. programs across the country. Endangered birds are protected by the Endangered Species Act, and all migratory birds are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. If feral-colony caretakers are held to be legally responsible for the cats, they could conceivably be charged with violations of either act by aiding and abetting the killing of endangered or migratory birds. Before the trial, in fact, Stevenson’s lawyer, Tad Nelson, considered reading John Newland his Miranda rights — just to make the point — but decided against it. (“He’s just a sweet old man who loves cats,” Nelson said. “There’s no reason to beat him up over this.”)
Bringing the Endangered Species Act into play could force states and the federal government to take a more active role in managing feral cats. It could potentially lead to the development of a new kind of wildlife management, one that recognizes the cat’s half-domesticated, half-wild ecological niche and its unique political position in America. Industrial and residential development is carving the continent into islands of wildlife habitat. Birds are increasingly left with isolated patches of forest and seashore, surrounded by hostile territory. The feral cats under the San Luis Pass bridge are important only because the piping plovers have nowhere else to go. The rest of Galveston Island has been given over to vacation condos and seafood restaurants.
The same predicament is unfolding all over the country. Bob Sallinger told me about the loss of bird habitat in Portland, which is widely considered one of the greenest cities in America. “Habitat loss is the No. 1 problem, no doubt,” he said, “but that’s all the more reason to deal with these secondary problems. We don’t have the luxury of saying, Well, there’s all this habitat out there, and the birds will recover. It’s not, and they won’t.”
The cat killer’s trial lasted a full week. Jurors heard testimony for three days and then retired to consider Jim Stevenson’s fate. On Nov. 16, the jury returned to the courtroom and addressed the Galveston County district judge, Frank Carmona. After two days spent struggling with Stevenson’s act and the problem of cats and birds, the 12 jurors pronounced themselves hopelessly deadlocked. They simply couldn’t decide. The case was dismissed.
The war between cats and birds — and among their protectors — continues.
Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. His book, “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird,” will be published by Random House in February.
